The Kastrup-Holmegaard glassworks produced many different individually mouth-blown glass lamps for Fog & Mørup during the 1960s. Today the least well-known of these are the Havanna series, which emerged at the end of that decade. The range included the Jo Hammerborg-designed Cirkel, Radius and Dania and Bent Nordsted’s Kora, Sita and Rota.
The feature that tied the series together was their smokey golden colour, entitled Havanna. It was, the advertisements explained, a brand new glass colour, specially developed after much experimentation by Kastrup-Holmegaard for Fog & Mørup. The golden tone, it was claimed, would light up a room with the same warm glow as a log fire, creating an atmosphere of cosiness and elegance, but without the discoloration of the surroundings that came with a fire.
Month: May 2011
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Kastrup-Holmegaard’s Havanna series for F&M
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PH & Panton weren’t just good friends
The family connection between two of the great Danish lighting designers is widely known – indeed, anyone who is aware of Simon Henningsen‘s work will almost certainly know that he was the the son of Poul Henningsen. But less well known is the fact that Verner Panton was also, by marriage, a part of the extended Henningsen family.
Our story begins with the marriage of one Inger Andersen to dentist Otto Victor Kemp and the subsequent birth on 30 December 1928 of their daughter, Tove Kemp, on the Danish island of Fyn. Tove was born in Gentofte – a small town that was also the birthplace in 1926 of Verner Panton. Tove’s mother Inger later married Poul Henningsen, who thus became Tove’s stepfather. Tove grew up to be a music teacher, and in 1950 she married Verner Panton – making him PH’s son-in-law.
Verner and Tove were divorced just three years later in 1953, but the warm relationship that existed between Panton and the Henningsen family endured. Panton was close to PH’s son Simon – Tove Kemp’s stepbrother, born in 1923 to PH’s first wife Elsa Strøjberg – and to Simon’s wife Bente, who worked for some time as Panton’s secretary. And as two of the most important lamp designers in Louis Poulsen’s history, Panton and PH had a strong professional connection and shared interest to add to their friendship and family ties. Both designed lights that are still in production at Poulsen today.
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Jo Hammerborg: a man in the shadows
Jo Hammerborg joined Fog & Mørup as head of design in 1957 and retired in 1980, only a short time before both his own death and the demise of the company. The Hammerborg era was F&M’s most successful period – both creatively and commercially – as Hammerborg’s distinctively understated modernist designs and the unremittingly high standards of quality he imposed at the company won international acclaim and generated huge markets both at home and abroad. The sleek Hammerborg style spawned copies and lookalikes by the dozen, but none were able to attain the perfection in proportion or the unparalleled quality that are the hallmarks of a Hammerborg creation.
Hammerborg’s prolific work rate generated an astonishingly wide catalogue of light designs, all of which have survived the test of time and look as fresh and compelling today as they did 40 or 50 years ago. They include the Alfa, Askepot, Beta, Central, Classic, Club, Corona, Cylinder, Dano, Diskos, Eiffel, Etna, Flet, Flora, Flora-Lite, Fuga, Golf, Heliotrop, Horisont, Hydra, Juno, Kardinal, Kastor, Kegle, Kubus, Life, Lotus, Medio, Metro, Milieu, Monolit, Nordlys, Nova, Optica, Orient, Pastel, Penta, Pisa, President, Poker, Pompei, Regent, Reijmyre, Roulet, Runda, Saturn, Sektor, Senior, Sera, Single, Skala, Studio, Tarok, Trombone, Tunika, Ultra, Variant, Vega, Zenith, Zero and Zone.
This much we have been able to piece together. But beyond that – about the man himself – very little information is available. Who was Jo Hammerborg? We know that his full name was Johannes Hammerborg, that he was born in 1920 and died in 1982. Per H Hansen and Klaus Petersen’s Den Store Danske Møbelguide tells us that he trained in 1944 as a silversmith and subsequently studied at Copenhagen’s Art Academy before joining Georg Jensen to work as a silversmith from 1949 to 1957. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the 1966 special edition of Mobilia magazine that was entirely dedicated to a 100-year retrospective of Georg Jensen makes no mention of Hammerborg or his work.
The only known photograph of Hammerborg is the one reproduced above, a tantalising portrait in which his eyes seem to pierce through the blurry image and speak directly to us. People who worked with Hammerborg at Fog & Mørup say he was physically small in stature – almost child-sized. But beyond that, it seems no one has anything to say, and although in the past decade his name has become a worldwide byword for innovative lighting design, there is no sign of any contribution to the global conversation about him from any spouse, children, siblings or other family members.
Since those who knew him personally or worked with him will today be of a certain age, there is every possibility that they will take the information they hold with them to the grave, and their precious insights into this diminutive giant of lighting design may be lost forever. We therefore appeal to anyone who has even the smallest snippet of information to share it with us. Leave a response to this post, email us at info@vintage-danish-lights.com, or simply write it all down and give it to someone who will share it with the world for posterity.